Greg Woodman has spent 50 years proving that B2B buyers make decisions with their hearts before they justify them with numbers. He joins The Missing Half Podcast to trace a career that started selling t-shirts tailgate to tailgate at Penn State and grew into a marketing philosophy built on customer discovery, emotion, and belonging. Greg walks through the Airwalk story, where he served as chief marketing officer and helped grow the footwear brand from $16 million to $200 million in three and a half years by understanding what shoe buyers actually cared about: margin and inventory turn rather than product features. Bill and Greg discuss voice of customer research, the strategy that has to come before any tactic, the resurgence of trade shows and in-person selling, and the difference between private equity that grows a company and private equity that runs it into the ground.

Greg is the owner of Affinity Connection, leveraging knowledge of affinity and one-to-one consumer marketing to provide the most compelling, engaging products to drive revenues and participation.

Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast, where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today, I am live from State College, which for those of us who are outside of Pennsylvania watching, this is in the heart, center of our state and has a rich history of education and economic development. And I'm here today with Greg Woodman to talk all things B2B marketing. Greg, thank you for joining us today.

Greg: Thank you. Bill. I'm delighted to be on.

Bill: So, Greg, you, are sitting here at the intersection of just an amazing geographic area, a lot of development. You've got the university. You have a business that is involved in more the D2C area, but you also have been for many, many years, and we won't say how many for either of us, because I don't make those references anymore. I'm old enough that people don't need me to name the number. They can look at me and say, I've been around for a while. And you're probably in that space as well. But you've been participating in B2B marketing now for many, many years and decades. So maybe, just introduce yourself and let's start talking, shop?

Greg: Sure. It's been 50 years, Bill. I came here to Penn State in 1976, and other than five years in Baltimore, never left. And as you mentioned, home of Penn State, we call the region Happy Valley, have had an amazing, delightful career in B2B marketing and B2C marketing. And it all started by as a college student here selling a t shirt into the tailgates here at Penn State.

Bill: So you're one of the like. So if you started that today, you would be all over the socials promoting yourselves as an influencer. So you're kind of one of these like people before your times and what you've done.

Greg: Well, interesting you would say that because there certainly was no internet, there were no fax machines, there was no computers, you know, so we I just bought a t shirt and walked tailgate to tailgate and sold a National Tailgate Champ t shirt. And and yes, I through getting to know the clients in the tailgate, sometimes I'd barter for a beer or hamburger. They would tell me week by week at home games what product they would buy from me and what they wanted. And so that became my product development. Listening to customers. And so I came out with more shirts. I came out with posters, different designs. I came out with a cardboard figure of Joe Paterno because you need Joe at your tailgate. And this was all the ideas came from being face to face in those tailgate fields is where I got my start, and I've used that same formula for the last 50 years and helping companies grow by doing the customer discovery.

Bill: So I think that's so important, we're at a moment in B2B marketing that while we're advancing really quickly, not only with all the digital tools that are available, but now with AI, that the reality is we have to go back to those foundational elements of voice of customer research, pain points, and then coming up with the target audience and then relentlessly communicating our value proposition to those, those target audiences. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that and what you've seen over your, you've mentioned 50 years. I didn't say it. 50 years of experience of of working with large manufacturers all over the world. I know you've had a storied career and continue to do that type of work, but maybe talk about that model and what you've learned and observed over the past several decades.

Greg: Sure. Well, as you know, we live here in the Marcellus Shale Williamsport area down, you know, down. And we're able to frack for natural gas. So I always tell people I mine and I frack into the heart for love. So I'm a I'm a love fracker. And I'm always mining to unearth. Where the, where's the love? And so I've done that in my career by going, much like in the tailgate fields. Why do you love Penn State? It's a feeling. It's an emotion. It's a non tangible. And as you know, we all make buying decisions 80, 90% on emotion. So as a career marketer, my shtick has been dive into the heart. You know, you mentioned technology and AI. I am more convinced we're going more into the trust belonging economy as the the counter to technology and robots and AI is the heart is more important. So marketing has to be better at mining and fracking into the love of being in love with solving a problem. If you're the company for your customer, like why do they start that company? Why did you mortgage your house? Get to the origin story and then it's just being Cupid, you know, finding what your customer's pain points are, whether it's B2C or B2B and be the Cupid and create the pipelines of connection. And so belonging, trust, the human advantage. I think marketing is going completely into fracking love.

Bill: Sure. No, I agree with that. And I think all that AI and digital does is helps us get there faster and better, and it's harder to hide the truth. So in some ways, we no longer have to, craft a facade around the business. It's getting to the heart of the matter and then communicating that to the market, because there are too many information channels that will dispel marketing fluff, as it were, really, really quickly. So it's, who is your customer? What problem are you solving? Are you mission driven? Are you passionate about solving that problem for that customer base? And if we can find that and then communicated to the market, that's where the magic happens, right?

Greg: Exactly. I always say it's creating a pneumatic tube. Like we have the bank, a pneumatic tube between the heart in the soul of the company, in the heart and soul of of a prospect and a customer, and then playing Cupid to create the distribution of that pneumatic tube will go… you know, and then having a dialog which is a form of connection, and then bringing them down the sales funnel of awareness, interest, desire and marriage. I look at everything as like ultimately it's a wedding, you know, the first sacrament is turning water into wine at a wedding, you know? So my whole career is about organizing these pneumatic tubes to have a consummation of a wedding. You know where it's a party. And so we've done a lot of summits where you invite customers in and you go deep on two and a half days together where there's human connection. So I'm all into that human advantage. And because of AI, you've heard AI slop. I mean, everybody now can fire arrows trying to be cupid and they're just creating noise. And the more noise there is, for those they can connect really, and, and send that wedding invitation to the rehearsal dinner and then to the wedding and then to the shower. My whole career has been what I learned in 1978, in the tailgate fields here at Penn State, which, you know, 100 to 200,000 people in those fields. You know, only 108 get in the stadium. But everybody else is there for the picnic. So I use these kind of picnic weddings. What is this pickup basketball game that happens in these tailgate fields where there's low stakes to get in, and then you create a deeper connection. And so I've just fired arrows all to that core base of understanding the customer. And I just want to kind of throw this out for discussion. Costco. Costco has become, I study Costco. Like, why are they so, so successful? They sell toilet paper. People walk out of there and say, I love Costco, I'm a member. I belong to Costco. I get here an hour. I have the Costco credit card. Like, they're selling toilet paper. They're a modern example of how they did that. I just am fascinated.

Bill: So I think let's take these, lessons that you learned in the, tailgate, whatever you want to call it, gauntlet of voice of customer research. And then you built a career in B2B where you, before you launch your agency, you worked with Airwalk. Could you maybe talk to us about the Airwalk story and how you took that, maybe that, cut out of Joe and the t-shirt and that culture, and then applied it to, not a theory, that you applied to B2B and had a tremendously successful run.

Greg: Well, I was in my early 30s doing my affinity connections, selling cardboard Joe Paterno's mail order before the internet. So I had to do printed catalogs and send them out to alums, and they’d send me checks and a P.O. box, and I’d box up t shirts and greeting cards and shower curtains and send them all over the world. And Airwalk was headquartered in Altoona, Pennsylvania, 45 minutes away. And it was this $16 million company that was only selling shoes on the West Coast and the East Coast, because it was surfer, it was skateboarding. It was a cultural, you know, near water kind of brand. And they had a they had an office out in San Diego, skateboard culture. This is circa 1993. Owner puts the bat signal out there that he's looking for some consultant to help him on marketing. So I go in on a, as a consultant and, and since he was an old shoe manufacturer that literally had manufacturing shoe factories in Altoona, my first check said piece rate because he paid everybody by the piece. Piece rate. And I still have that check. He paid me a small amount of money. He said, would've been, I'll try you out. So from week to week, I was consulting with them. And, and what I figured is that these young men around the world who are the alternative kid, they just want to belong. They want to belong to an affinity group which happened to have a culture of alternative music, skateboarding. You know, we literally stood out of our local high school, State College Area High School, and I stood out there as a consultant with a clipboard. 2000 kids went out at the end of school on busses, and we count of how many people were wearing Airwalk, how many were wearing Nike, how many were wearing Adidas, you know, all the way down. And I think three kids in State College were wearing Airwalk and they were, frankly, alternative kids with piercings and purple hair. And that was the skateboard culture circa 1993. So the owner said, Woodman, I need to grow this company. I'm in poor health. I'm 72 years old. I've had four heart attacks. So I want to grow this fast and I want to sell it, and then I want to die. And you're my guy.

Bill: Everybody’s got a plan.

Greg: Be my mercenary. And so I didn't know much about footwear other than having worn shoes. And I was a big Converse guy, so. But I understood by doing that the research, the persona and the mindset and the heart of these kids. And we we got to know them. And then it was just a matter of connecting the culture of skate alternative kid and celebrating these kids as as the hero. We were the guy to have them belong to this club of Club Airwalk. So we came up with all types of ways to do that, and we grew by first opening up distribution right here in State College and then in Clearfield. We moved around the state to experiment if we could open up retail here in Pennsylvania. And Hiller didn't give me much budget, so we just did it guerilla, go and talking to him, what's it going to take to get our shoes in there? We did one store at a time, one town, one town at a time in Pennsylvania. Then we hired a couple commission reps. We started in Pennsylvania. Then we went to Tennessee, and we proved the model that we could sell shoes in here by connecting our heart, doing some local marketing. To get the kid in, we push the shoes in the stores and then we pulled them through with local marketing and it worked. And then we just started almost. We call it the Normandy effect. We had maps all over. We were getting phonebooks sent in, again, before the internet. We had phone books coming in, and we'd find shoe stores and we put it in the database. And then we tell the story. You know, we put a lot of stuff in on consignment and originally, but as soon as we got all our distribution, we we sold it in. Then we pulled it through with, consumer marketing. But we grew from 16 to $200 million in three and a half years.

Bill: That's insane. That’s amazing.

Greg: And what we did in Pennsylvania, then we did it here in America. We went to Canada, then we went to Mexico, then we went to South America, and we went Europe. Then we went to Australia. So I traveled around the world, but it was a B2B play, us to the shoe stores, up to the the foot lockers of the world, the foot actions, the shank and tittles. And I just loved all of these. And it was really connecting the vision with these buyers. And and I understood from the buyers they cared about, not the gum rubber soul or the, the suede or the the percentages of softness. They cared about margin and turn. They got their bonuses if these shoes sold four inventory turns and they got a 50% margin. So what do they want? How do they want it? That's always been the hallmark of my career. They wanted margin four times a year and they wanted 50, actually with pre-booking discounts and a couple percent, 52%. So we were the number one bonus creating vendor for shoe buyers around the world because Nike was only giving 40 margin, 40% margin. So I, again connecting hearts. What does the buyer want? He wants margin and turn. What is this? What does the consumer want? He wants to feel cool. He wants to wear the badge of of youth, music, sport, style, you know. And I had a I became the chief marketing officer, helped, you know, worked there for seven years, won marketer of the year and all kinds of accolades. But it was really simple to me. Connecting hearts. Heart of that 16 year old boy. Then we expanded to women. And then using the tactics, you know, of of trade marketing. I've always been a database plus storyteller from the point of view of that 16 year old boy. And we got into their heart. They were not about like the Nike win at all costs. Nike wanted to win, the Airwalk kid wanted to play. He wanted to be part of his his his brothers in the skate park and, it was a different culture. So we understood the culture connected hearts. That was the B2C, but the B2B was margin and turn, you design your plan, just a pneumatically tube to connect to both.

Bill: So when you talk about that, I think there's a very important, something that may be missing in people's approach to marketing, especially in B2B and ABM, account-based marketing. The problem you were trying to solve to achieve greater growth was margin and turn, not swayed soft. And so many manufacturers, so many B2B service companies focus on the thing that they are delivering, and its features and benefits and what it does. And you know what matters. It's margin and turn, because I always talk to our clients about when we think about our buyer and we think about the emotional part of the decision, get them promoted, keep them out of trouble with their boss, make sure they're not on Pip, make sure they're getting a great year end performance review. Those are the things that matter. In your case, it was margin and turn, not oh, I have different, assortments or colors or whatever is I'm not a shoe guy, so I like I wear them as well, but I, I, I don't participate in that, part, but it's, it's very interesting to see that the problem you were trying to solve in B2B had nothing to do with the product, per se. You solved a business problem for shoe store owners and buyers that was emotionally like tied to their, desires. And then that's what, I mean, 16 to 200 million in that short of a period time is incredible. To to to go through that story a little bit, you guys were successful in selling, that business and, the owner went off into the sunset and.

Greg: Well, yeah, I helped him sell the business to private equity. And he literally died a year after the sale of a heart attack, you know? So it was on his vision that he would die. And he did. And he set his family up well. Now, unfortunately, private equity ran the company into the ground within three years because they didn't understand something you were alluding to. What business they were in. They thought they were in the shoe business. You know, there's a famous Theodore Levitt article from 1961 that asked the question, called Marketing Myopia, to ask the question, what business are you really in? And he speaks to the railroad industry when he was a consultant from Harvard, went to them and asked, what business are you really in, railroad? And these were all the MBAs of our time from the Ivy leagues. They look back and said, we're in the railroad business. And his whole thesis is had they said where they were in the transportation business, Altoona might be where Boeing is, versus half the population they were because they were in the railroad business. So so this marketing craft that we share, an affinity for, you know, it's it's really critical to understand the product, the price, the place and the promotion, the four P's. But at the core of this, what business are you really in? And when I got in the footwear industry as a consultant, knowing nothing about footwear, I'd go on sales calls with sales guys and they’re buying these shoes talking about rubber soles and thick tongues. And you know, the, I don't know the millage of suede and and the buyer’s just going, I don't need features and benefits. What are you doing for me? What's our partnership going to be? Am I going to hit my bonus or am I going to, you know, and if the shoes don't sell, you're going to take them back, you know, so it's back to partnership. You know, it's back to belonging. It's back to, you know, on the B2B side, connecting the heart and understanding what the buyer, what they care about. And so I still say Airwalk was never in the shoe business the way we were in the self-esteem business. The the high school kids, and they wanted to belong to a tribe of like minded people. And the the foot lockers, which is amazingly, they've sold out the Dick's Sporting Goods. I never would have thunk that in the 90s that the big dog got bought up by the emerging Pittsburgh firm of Dick's, which I think is great, but I used to go to 233 Broadway every week, and just to get into their store, they gave me one test in San Diego. And then I never forget when I sat there in my first presentation, I said, I'm going to give you a path that you're going to be buying $15 million worth of shoes from us, and we were just like the start up to them or some skate brand. They just laughed at me. They they always told me that story, that they just never, and they ended up buying $15 million worth of shoes. Because I did the math. If we sell through like we did in San Diego, you have 2700 stores, you're going to be doing. And so they go, ended up buying that. But I will tell you, we did advertise on Beavis and Butthead on a Tuesday at like 9:08. We did a commercial when we had all the shelves filled and that helped pull it through.

Bill: Well sure. Well, and there's a lot of nuance to what we're talking about, right? And a lot of details and hard work. And one of the things you brought up and I think is something a string we should pull on, what's missing with private equity is the, like there seems to be two, schools or two. There seems to be two groups in private equity right now. We have a lot of companies who are treating it just as a financial exercise, which it sounds like is what happened with Airwalk and then we have other private equity that is operationally focused and really makes sure that when they do the due diligence, they can buy into the mission of the company they're buying, because when they do the voice of customer research, when they really get in and figure out what business they're in, that's where we're seeing private equity, hit the hold period, 3 to 5 years, not seven, nine, 12 like we're seeing with a lot of companies. They hit the targets. They may be outperform the targets with organic growth, with performance. And of course, what matters to those folks is when it happens. And how big is the exit so they can make their money. So we're seeing a lot of that. When you think about private equity and where it stands, venture capital, those type of, industries, how are they missing this marketing or where have you seen it work well, and what's your perspective on that?

Greg: Well, we had a lot of suitors for our brand, and I was one of the chief marketing guys on all the presentations. So I was pulling for a footwear company like Stride Right to buy us. Or Nike was kicking our tires. Soon as private equity bought us, I could tell with the team they sent in, they were going to be the operators of the brand. Within four conversations, I chose to get out.

Bill: Nice.

Greg: It comes down to really simple. If if you look at the early Southwest Airlines with Herb Kelleher, or you look at even Costco. There are those who get it and those who don’t. And financial people, private equity, they've gotten to their successful way I consider out of fear-based approach to things. What we're talking about, or what I believe in, what made southwest Airlines what they became under Herb Kelleher, which they're losing now since he died, and what Costco has, amazingly, as they sell toilet paper different than maybe JCPenney or Sears is what I call love. Love of the consumer. And love of their heart. And why you got in the business in the first place to solve a problem and bring pleasure to that customer. The number guys come in sometimes to a certain extent, and they don't understand love. Because they but, how they got there was fear and bottom line bean counting and and risk aversion, risk mitigation. This soft stuff of art and love and human connection and the human advantage. It falls on deaf ears. And guys like me are considered woo woo woo idiots, you know. So marketing then gets almost cast into the art department. No, no, Phil Knight's a marketer. He knows the product. He knew the the benefit of Steve Prefontaine. And when he dies and he's kind of pulled back a little bit, Nike’s starting to slip. Because and believe me, my whole career, I've tried to in a linear way, explain it. And, that's why I'm delighted to have this conversation with a fellow marketer, because what we're talking about is not seen in many C-suite operations and is not seen very much in private equity.

Bill: Sure. No it's definitely missing.

Greg: If you look at the results of these private equity, because the the number guys are running it often. Now, good private equity can really grow a company, you know, like a Vans. When we were 200 million, Vans was only 110. Now, we sold when we were at 200 million. We were double the size of Vans. We were triple the size of Skechers, who was just starting. Vans is a $4 billion company today. Skechers is a $10 billion company. Had that private equity understood that the gold that they had just bought on the cheap. But no, the frickin number guys. Darn it. You know, and and that brand could be here in central PA. We had 250 employees. We'd have like 4000 right now. This this community would be just. Plus we'd be a consumer brand capital. I don't think there's been a consumer brand pop out of this region that hit 200 million ever. And it could be a $4 billion company. We were twice Vans. We were, we had the authentic heart connected.

Bill: Sure. Well I love it. And see this is where I agree, I agree Greg that one of the things that happens when we're approaching B2B, manufacturing, private equity, whatever the ownership structure is behind B2B, we're often seen as alchemists, right. And this magic and smoke and mirrors. And I think when you…

Greg: It’s discipline.

Bill: Yes. Oh, 100% and I would argue that the tools we have available to us today, we can combine science with art, maybe better than most other fields. Just because, you know, you have digital, you have tons of data now. We have so much data. It's ridiculous. We're to the point where we're actually hiring a statistician, be putting them on staff because we're dealing with so much data that it is beyond my ability, with rudimentary addition and subtraction, to understand the behavior, like the the patterns and the regressions and those type of things that they're reminding me of.

Greg: Let AI do that.

Bill: Yeah. But hen we got to, like, set it up right and analyze it and, make sure, we have the right probabilistic models. But the, I was at a conference last week, sidebar, and there was an hour long conversation by PhDs on the bias of AI and how you have to work against it, especially when you're getting deep into, like, data sets and not just like surveying the internet. Fascinating. I, I'm stayed awake the whole time. I took a lot of notes. I didn't understand much of what they said because I'm not a PhD. And, but anyway, when we think about we have data, we have digital. Now, we have AI. And then you add that to understanding the voice of customer research and the heart and the problem you're really trying to solve. We can combine science and art and my, premise, and we're doing this every day. And I know you're doing it through your Affinity Connection, and we're doing it through 50 Marketing and the 50 Family of Brands is we are able to bring world class marketing to the mid-market at a cost effective level that was only available to the Fortune 500, because we're adopting AI, because we're bringing that technology to bear. What have you seen recently, like ten years ago, only the super well-funded large companies could afford this amazing approach. Now we're able to, you know, if you have a $20 million company, a $50 million company, even a $10 million company, you can allocate 100, 200, 300 grand a year, and you can start to see the needle move really, really quickly because we bring together data, digital, AI and the art and the love and the heart together.

Greg: Well, that's why I'm delighted to be on your podcast, because I want to partner with you. Because your science and your heart, combined with my experience on the art of the heart and fracking for the heart and a track record of seeing the benefits of that, you know, I think we're going to be able to offer collectively, a heck of a service to manufacturers, especially here in Pennsylvania, who I my heart is having them grow and I watch them from afar and I say, oh, they're just missing what we're talking about. And if they get that, they're going to have more customers. They're going to employ more people. Everybody wins. And these are some amazing manufacturers here in Pennsylvania. And I have to I have to illustrate that I'll get a lot of calls. I own Affinity Connection. So we we find databases. We are, at the core, a data plus storytelling company. So I'll get calls from people saying, can you find me a database? And I am shocked that a lot of the manufacturing companies really don't have a good database of prospects, nor understand how there's their fish in a barrel just waiting for their offer that are just easy to get the data, easy to find out the email, easy to send an invitation to a a summit, which is how you can throw a wedding. And so all the noise of AI and AI is getting less smart as more people are dumping crap in it. So what is happening out there in the world of marketing is AI plus a kid out of college that can do some social media? Everybody thinks that's the be all magic bullet. But there is the art and the science. And what you've done with 50 Marketing I marvel at, and I'm tapping into that success you've had because that's that's the formula. You know, one plus one is is is it as 11 as I say, or three plus this whole co-op, this whole belonging? I am really into this trust belonging movement that you belong to Costco. You belong to Amazon. These are membership. And my background in Affinity Connection. I've raised $100 million for alumni interest groups and nonprofits that are membership groups. So again, I'm fracking for like, why do these? Why is the love there amongst an alumni interest group that was in a fraternity, you know, and and why is Costco have figured out a way to or even these loyalty points with airlines? I mean, notice, you know, the I just saw the Wall Street Journal the airlines don't even think they're in the airline business. They're in the points business. That's keeping us traveling. It's looking at credit card companies have figured out a way again, noticing when private equity does figure out love they become very successful. Royalty credit card points. Airlines, even though they're always on the verge of bankruptcy, they hook up to the belonging of the credit card points. Costco, benefit of membership. Amazon. So this belonging thing, that's why I'm out there knocking on some doors, because I think we have a little bit of a formula to help people grow ten x growth maybe. Let's do it.

Bill: Oh it's available.

Greg: It's there.

Bill: Yes. I was on a, driving up here to State College this morning. I was on a call with one of our clients, and we're looking at taking him from 5 to 25 million. And we have a clear path. And he's excited and it's happening. And like, those are the moments we live for. And to go back to your comments, when we think about the local economy in the local market, I was in Denver two weeks ago, and everywhere you look, they're building. I was in Austin, Texas in May and Dallas Fort Worth and they’re building everywhere. There's plants, there's schools, there's homes. It's just so much infrastructure and so much growth. And then you come back to western Pennsylvania, central Pennsylvania. And it is a challenging economy. It is a challenging, you know, I have children that I would love to live around as they.

Greg: I'd love my kids to boomerang back.

Bill: Right. And but the opportunities aren't here like they were maybe in the 70s or 80s. Which I wasn't necessarily participating in the economy at that point, other than as a child consumer through my parents. But, there were a lot of jobs back when there was steel and coal and a lot of manufacturing. And we have to bring that back, and we have to first, we have to maintain and grow the ones we have. We need to help the companies that exist today grow and do the best they can, and then that will help us attract more jobs and more factories, more B2B service companies, more B2B tech companies. One of the. So full disclosure, Missing Half audience. Greg and I are working together. His Affinity Connection, the 50 Family of Brands and all we bring to the table to really bring our services here towards central Pennsylvania. And, so we'll be talking about that. Anybody who's listening, get in touch with Greg here, in State College. And if you have any concerns or would like to further the conversation and the, let's talk about the solution we're going to provide, because, we're not here to talk about marketing per se. What are the pain points that these clients are experiencing and how are we going to help them? And I think the ultimate path is you have business owners or ownership groups that are not growing. They don't know where growth is coming from. They don't have a plan. They don't have a strategic approach to how they're going to grow. They're tired of hiring people who sell marketing, as opposed to people who are going to come in with a lot of experience. And between you and I, we have decades plus, but you started that conversation. We've dealt with small companies. We've dealt with $100 million, 200 million, $300 million companies. We have the experience to develop the strategy. And then not only, you know, we don't drive in like McKinsey and give you the strategy of increase sales, reduce costs and drive away in our Porsches. We give you a practical strategy with a tactical plan and a budget that meets what you're doing or what you need to do, and then we can actually execute that.

Greg: We execute it. That’s the key. You know. So you ask a great question about shrinking companies, not creating jobs for our children who live in Scottsdale or San Diego, as my two boys do. And I'm always, now I have a grandson. I want to lure them back. And they said, dad, no jobs, you know, create jobs. And I think when I, these manufacturing companies or any company, do they want to grow? That's usually my first question. And when you said you get enthused when you have a path to five x grow someone, you can see it. You see the potential, you get excited. You make your proposal. They have to, number one, do they want to grow? I have found a lot of people don't want to grow.

Bill: And that's fine.

Greg: They just want to keep it. Mo money, mo problems is their attitude versus no, if you get new customers in here and fill your capacity, you're going to create jobs. You're going to help the economy. You're going to have more stability. You're not going to have a competitor come in and because of AI and wipe you out, you know? So you got to grow. As Joe Paterno said, you're either growing or you're shrinking. You can't stay the same. So we marketers are evangelists of growth, is we see it, we see the potential and it's so frustrating because we have the methodology. Which is a lot of iteration and testing and trying, you know, throwing some arrows at it. But getting to the strategic heart of the matter of what does your customer want? What do they want, and why do they want and what would they pay for it? We study that before making recommendations on how to have that wedding happen. And actually I always say, once you know who you are and what and you do want to grow, there's a clear path. There's books written on it. And and what has happened is why a lot of people I think don't want to grow is they've been burned by alleged marketers who come in, well, if you just use social media, what the heck? You're just going to create awareness. What? That doesn't do anything. Yell fire in a theater.

Bill: Facebook is not the answer, right? I will probably be shadow banned or whatever, but.

Greg: Yeah, you got to mix it. You got to have a strategic marketing mix, but none of that's worth anything until you have a strategy, which I call the Normandy strategy. You got to know what mountain you're going after before you start sending in boats and wiping out infantries of people trying to get Hitler. I mean, you got to know strategically and so much of marketing that people have bought has been tactical execution. You got to do strategy before tactics. What did Peter Drucker say? You know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And so you got to even go up even further. Do you want to belong with more customers? Do you want to create a partnership with these 50 dream prospects that can make or break your year? If we lure them in to the wedding with you, manufacturer? And that's fun to be matchmakers. That's what you do. That's what I do. And together I think we can do it quicker, faster, better. Using all the science that you're bringing to the party. And really like when you lit up a little bit about saying, you see a clear path there, that's me. You know, I teach entrepreneurship at Penn State, and I do light up when I see the potential in the kid, often when they don't even see it in themselves. And then I give them the prompts and the blueprint and the recipe. And then by the end of the semester, they they now believe, of the reputation I gave him, to live up to, it’s confidence. Does the owner have confidence that they have a solution, that the market needs more of? That's an assessment we got to figure that out usually in the discovery call. And do you really want to grow? You want to grow 5X, 2X. Can you finance a 10x growth? I mean this is what we marketers do.

Bill: It's not alchemy.

Greg: It's not.

Bill: It's it's science. It's data plus science plus tactics to find the heart and then to get those buyers. One of the things so and I know we're coming close to our time here, but I want to talk about why it's so important to have the right strategy and illustrate it with a couple of conversations. When we approach B2B marketing for manufacturers, for agricultural companies, for B2B service companies, for wholesale companies, the, a lot of the pushback we get in initial conversations is, oh, you're just going to do digital, you're going to going to do website and social media and whatever. The the reality is today, we need to do so much more. And a lot of it involves traditional marketing such as direct mail, such as, and you hit on this and I'm going to talk about this and really expand on this subject. Events. The touching grass movement. I mean, I thought after Covid, I thought trade shows were dead. The last several trade shows I've attended, you cannot walk through the aisles. There is so many, it's worse than a Penn State football game, a Steelers football game. You can't get to the food or the like. It's so crowded, the airports, the motels, because people don't just want to do it online. They want to go and have that heart connection and figure this company out. They say they're this online. What are they like in person? How have you seen the mixture, and maybe explain how we bring so much value to the table because we understand how to pull all of those different levers simultaneously to get to that result?

Greg: Well, you just reported something from field intelligence about trade shows are booming and and prospects now before they sign a purchase order of $5 million, they're not going to do it just for the Zoom call anymore. They want to go meet with you. They want you may have a couple drinks with you. They want to go deep with you to say, can I trust you? You know, if I'm going to sign 2 million, can you can you fulfill this contract? Because my career's on the line. And now that's why I call it the trust economy. The belonging economy. There's a yearning to go deep. They want to meet the C-suite people. The C-suite people can’t sit in the corner office anymore. You know, we got to bring their heart into that show, or at least through the right marketing tactics and show there's humans behind this company. This isn't a software as a service, private equity led company that we're going to get a notice in six months that it just merged with Blackbaud or something, you know, which happens to us who have bought stuff is you just, there's again, private equity just rolls everybody up. They want to deal with humans. People it is I don't know if it's a counter to AI or you know, robots, but people I mean, you drove up here to do this podcast means the world to me. We could have done it on zoom. But no, you bring your, you know, your children, and, you know, this is humans connecting. I mean, we're doing we're building this platform, Connect Happy Valley, based large part on trust. That's the heart. So it's hope. It's it's we see the future.

Bill: We believe in it.

Greg: We believe. And that's what it comes down to. I think marketing is that 16 year old boy at Airwalk or the person in the tailgate, they believed in me and my t shirts. They believed in each other. We were the tailgate champs. I think we had just lost Alabama and we were actually I had a national tailgate shirt made up in art and we lost Alabama. So I changed it to National Tailgate Champs. I, I heard I spent a thousand bucks on the art, but that turned out to be my best shirt. But anyway. But a lot of emotion, heart, trust, and we buy things in B2B, whether we're buying even coffee this morning, emotionally. And so how can they pigeonhole the alchemy of marketing is woo woo. It's heart, it's emotion. And we have studied it in our careers and we've seen it work and work. And when you got excited about the potential you were envisioning connecting hearts of new customers coming into that manufacturing. So who wouldn't want, want more of that? And as you know, selling these type of professional services, it's not easy.

Bill: Oh it's tough.

Greg: Why is it so tough?

Bill: Well and I think part of that fault lies with us. So one of the things I challenge a lot of people with is why does private equity not get marketing and growth and go to, GTM? Why do manufacturing owners, why do B2B, distribution, wholesale, whatever company owners not get marketing and growth? I think one, we have not done a good job as a a group of professionals in communicating to them, and that's one of the reasons why I do the Missing Half podcast. It's another opportunity for us to communicate who we are. And like more, create more surface area for them to be exposed to. This isn't alchemy. Two, I think because of the disruption of the digital era. And now we're seeing it in AI. You know, if you go on any of the social channels now and scroll and if the feed is pushing AI to you, within minutes you will see posts that will, AI will fix everything with these three prompts. If you have marital problems, diet problems, and your business is struggling, download my three prompts and it'll fix them all in Claude. Right? I mean, that's and we get these sensational moments because of the entrepreneurial and growth disruption, capacity of these movements. But we can bring order to that chaos. I mean, one of the things I think you and I both pride ourselves on is bringing clarity so that when we're sitting across from a client, they have a clear understanding of their problem, a clear understanding of a solution and a path to get to that solution. We're not selling a tactic. We're tactic agnostic. We're platform agnostic. We're technology agnostic. It's how do we move you from where you are today to where you want to be the fastest, the best, the most economical that aligns with your mission of delighting those customers. And when we, if we can continue to communicate that, I think we can turn the tide. Maybe not for the world, but maybe in our little slice of heaven here, with our clientele and the people we interact with, and we can bring that clarity and help them achieve what they want to achieve, whether that's growth, whether that's more jobs, whatever their goals are, we can do that. So I think that's our challenge, right? That's the challenge of two guys who've been around a while to bring that truth to the market.

Greg: Well, speaking of weddings, I went out searching, vetted many, many firms until I found you, Bill. And if you recall, after working together, I said you're exactly the blue collar marketing firm. Because I'm blue collar. You know, lunch pail. I mean, we're going to. We're about results. You know, Airwalk wouldn't have grown had we not had results for our clients, which were shoe stores. And, you know, so even in the in, in my fundraising business, we have to bring in 50 x more than we cost. So I've always been results. I've always checked the point of sale at Footlocker every Sunday. They faxed me their results. And you have that same philosophy. Where did you learn this kind of approach to results-based marketing?

Bill: Great question. So going back to your piece check. Right. Like I came up through family-owned companies. So we had a family-owned company that started at $2.5 million in 1991. We grew it to over $100 million and sold it. So I understand.

Greg: 20 x growth.

Bill: Yeah. So I understand all those things. Yeah. And, there was no, nice try. It was let's get it done and let's go win. So we're competitive. You know, we're very nice and cordial here, but when we get in the trenches, we're going to go and fight and we're going to win. Because that's what we do. And I think, so 50 Marketing, our brand is found, based on the concept of an 1896 John Wanamaker said half or 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just wish I knew which half. So I've always, always taken that contrarian approach of if you're going to spend it, it has to earn. Because in some ways, I, you know, I'm kind of, Jekyll and Hyde. I studied a lot of finance and accounting in college, so I have that background. And then my darker side is this marketing, or maybe who knows which one's dark and which one’s light.

Greg: You know my opinion.

Bill: Yeah, that'll be a whole other podcast conversation. But, either way, investments have to return. Because if we give value to our clients and solve their problems, then they're going to be with us. I mean, our average client is with us between 6 and 9 years. The most common reason we lose a client is because they're purchased. Because we get this magic call. Bill, great news. We just sold to… and I'm like, great, we're fired. Because they...

Greg: They grew so much.

Bill: They grew so much. They're bought by a multinational, they're bought by a big firm. And then those firms usually move on to their providers, which is fine. That's the nature of this business. Were hired to be fired, but, that's how we've approached it, just like you. Well, Greg, you and I could talk and have, over these past, like, over the past year for hours and hours and we're going to run this back again and probably get more into some specific topics. I think we should probably have a conversation about AI. I think, everybody in the world is trying to figure out AI, one, as a business owner, how are you going to show up for AI search so that when buyers are searching and prompting to evaluate your product and service or against your competitors, how are you going to show up? We have answers for that. We are executing for our clients in that space, and I think that's an area where we could bring a lot of clarity to, central Pennsylvania. The second thing, we have another company called AIS, AI Implementation Specialists, where we're implementing aenetic AI to help companies improve, whether it's throughput, decrease cost, increase capacity. And this whole AI conversation is exploding. And we're taking another step further, just like we do with marketing and giving people a way to tactically implement it, that's practical. That provides a return. Not just AI to do it, not just marketing to do it. But here's a cash on cash return on investment in under six months for that investment. That's where we have to move these conversations. And I think to this, I am circling back to the question you asked me, why do people not get it? Why do we struggle so much to bring this to market? Because we have to educate the market on what's possible. Then do it. Provide the case studies which we have and prove that we can do it, and then just repeat that process in a disciplined way to, elevate our service, like penetration in the market. So we're really looking forward to working with you, continued. We have been for a while now and thoroughly enjoyed this. I love talking to someone who has a little bit of gray hair and has perspective, which is a good balance to a lot of our less experienced staff. I would say that is more technology and AI-focused. There's a lot of balance we're achieving there. But, Greg, thank you so much for joining us today.

Greg: Oh, Bill, this has been a lot of fun. We could go on for hours. The human in the loop. I just want to leave you with that thought.

Bill: That's right.

Greg: You talk AI, I just, I'm pushing more human, more heart. You you bring in a lot of this agentic AI to the party. And that's why I think we're going to be a good, good team to help solve problems for companies that want to grow.

Bill: Yes, yes.